The Games We Played

The Games We Played is a solo campaign game about the mechanisms of a toxic relationship. Walk a mile in the shoes of a survivor. The mechanisms themselves are the story. A truly unique and emotional experience. Toxic relationships are widely discussed nowadays, but explaining and understanding them is not easy. That’s partly because they are hard to grasp through one coherent narrative. Being inside is more like trying to find your way out of a maze with constantly moving walls, or trying to win a game that keeps changing its own rules to play against you. The Games We Played aims to recreate this experience through simple but meaningful game mechanisms. This gives the player a unique experience that sheds light on how these kinds of relationships work, and why it is so hard to break free from them. The game itself takes the form of a ring bound notebook, in which a person who lived through a relationship with a toxic partner has recorded their experience. Not as a diary, but as a series of solo card games. Each of them will present you with a different situation, highlighting various aspects and mechanisms of psychological, mental and emotional abuse, and the struggles of trying to deal with them. Each turn you play a card from your hand to one of the available slots in the book, activate effects you triggered, and then draw a card. Each slot can hold several cards, but they must always be ascending in value. Once you have a sufficient amount of cards on specific objective slots, you turn the page and check the consequences of your actions. You will often permanently mark cards with keywords such as “Anxious”, “Cautious” or “In Love”. These keywords change how you can play those cards in the future. This very simple base structure is broken up by all kinds of mechanical variations. Each chapter will play a little differently. But these variations aren’t just there to make play more interesting. Each mechanism is closely related to the subject matter, each action means something within the story. Maybe you are presented with two possible objectives. One that is very easily achieved and represents what your partner wants to do. And one that is very hard to fulfill and represents what you want to do. Which objective will you pursue? And what will the consequences be? Will you be rewarded for giving in? Are you doing the right thing or are you running into a trap? Can the game be trusted? —description from the designer